


The Hope of the Quendi

by SpaceWall



Series: The Iron King [3]
Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Coming of Age, Fate & Destiny, First Age, Gen, Gods, Grief/Mourning, Subversion of Fate & Destiny
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-31
Updated: 2020-12-31
Packaged: 2021-03-11 02:28:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,295
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28463847
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SpaceWall/pseuds/SpaceWall
Summary: Dior and Celebrimbor accept their duty. Maedhros and his advisors make their plan. Námo and his advisors consult on its implications.
Relationships: Beren Erchamion & Dior Eluchíl, Beren Erchamion/Lúthien Tinúviel, Dior Eluchíl & Lúthien Tinúviel, Námo | Mandos & Fëanor | Curufinwë, Námo | Mandos/Vairë the Weaver
Series: The Iron King [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1669603
Comments: 30
Kudos: 64





	The Hope of the Quendi

**Author's Note:**

> CW/TW: canonical character death in non-canonical way. Discussion of behaviour that could be read as suicidal (ie taking on battle with the understanding one will likely die)

Tragedy was a feature of life in Beleriand, in days of old. No matter how long it was averted for. Grief, the Speaking People of Arda knew, was the price of living free. They held their joys and miracles close, secure in the knowledge that they could not keep them forever. Mortal and immortal alike, they knew this.

Outside the walls of Doriath, where Melian held sway, and of Hidden Gondolin, the safest place in all Beleriand was undoubtedly Himring, where King Maedhros the Great and his friend Princess Lúthien the Bold held court. In the last great years of this fortress city, Dior the Fair was raised, secure among friends.

Dior had known the news was ill by the naked grief on Uncle Maedhros’s face. When he had ridden through the gate, Dior had felt the very fabric of Arda shivering with grief. It was no surprise when, three hours later, he found himself standing beside Celebrimbor, summoned to a family council. 

Maglor and Curufin stood to one side of Maedhros on the throne. Naneth and Adar stood on the other. All four of them looked as grim as he did. Maedhros was not wearing his crown. A sign, perhaps, of the ill times. At his feet, the child Gil-galad sat and listened while he fidgeted with a doll. The conversation was grim for his presence, but the child was the heir to Hithlum and Himring alike, and as such would need to know many grim things.

“Hithlum is fallen.” Adar said, speaking for all of them. “King Fingon is dead.”

Not the heir then, the King of Himring.  
Celebrimbor put his hand over his mouth. Dior found himself paralyzed, focused on the way Maedhros’s eyes had grown red from crying, the absence of his signature eyeliner. 

A long time ago, before Dior’s father was even born, King Fingon had carried Maedhros’s body down from the gates of Thangorodrim. He had not been the one to free Maedhros from death – though it was a secret, Dior knew that Fëanor had done that – but he had done every possible service he could, even in death, for Maedhros. Dior had no sense of what losing someone who you knew loved you that much must have been like.

The death of Fingon had gone like tear through the fabric of Arda. His spirit did not burn bright like Fëanor’s, nor cool fire as Maedhros’s had. But it had destroyed the balance of the Noldor, the twin kingship that had sustained them for centuries. And more. It had broken the heart of Maedhros, who had been sent, so many years ago, back to life in Beleriand. In his hidden city, Turgon, last of his siblings, had shared in that same grief, and the both of them shared their pain with those who remained close to them, and on, and on. The tragedy of the fall of Hithlum was almost too large to grasp, if even this one death could chip away at the hearts of so many. 

“What are we going to do now?” Dior forced himself to look away from Maedhros, at his mother’s lined face. She looked so much older in this moment than he ever remembered seeing her. His father did too. 

Lúthien and Maedhros shared a look that boded ill. They were each of them blessed, and each of them beloved. It was by their mutual efforts that their own part of Beleriand had been protected for as long as it had. The years of Dior’s childhood, spent in relative peace. 

“I have an idea as to what must be done,” Maedhros said. They all deferred to him, both in spite of his grief and because of it.

And he told it to them, with the cadence of a story he might have told to his son and heir.

Beleriand had become untenable. With Hithlum fallen, Himring could not hold. If Himring fell, then the forces of Morgoth would wash around isolated Doriath, sweeping away the remaining people of the Noldor and the Falathrim, the dwarves and men and even the other Sindar until it alone remained in a sea of death. And when that day came, Morgoth, who made Melian in all her power look as fragile as one of her songbirds, would come and crush her too. And so would end life in Beleriand, save in the service of the enemy.

“And you think there is nothing to be done?” Celebrimbor pressed, with some desperation. 

“No,” his father said. Of all of them, he was swiftest and most inclined to deliver ill news. “We have made a decision. All that remains is for the both of you to consent.”

Curufin laid the plan out for them in this fashion: that night, Celebrimbor and Dior would wed in the eyes of their parents and the valar. There would be no need for the match to be physical nor fruitful, should they so choose. In the morning, they would take Gil-galad and set out for the Havens of the Falas, where Círdan still held court pending a possible retreat to the Isle of Balar. With them, they would also bring –

“This,” Maedhros said, holding up an unassuming drawstring leather bag. It was smaller than Dior’s closed fist. Yet even so disguised he knew it instantly. The power of the thing sang out to the maiarin part of him, called as like to like. 

It was the reason for the wedding. Maedhros could not give over the Silmaril to those not of his kin. So, all three of them would be of his kin. At the Havens, they would leave Gil-galad in the care of Círdan, and set out, Silmaril in hand, for the far shore.

It was a plan designed with fear and compassion. All five of them, who had devised it, had known its costs and its benefits. No one had ever survived the journey to Aman. Carrying the Silmaril across Beleriand alone was a great risk. None of them wanted their children to risk and suffer in such a way. But it was the highest and best option they had. Of they five adults, none were fated to again set foot there in this lifetime. But Dior and Celebrimbor bore no such curse. Celebrimbor had sworn no oath, raised no sword at Alqualondë. He and Idril were the only ones, of those houses of Fëanor and Fingolfin who had been there and could say the same. Dior had never even had the opportunity to do any such thing. Sending the pair of them was the best chance they had.

And, of course, they sent their children away for another reason entirely. Dior knew it instinctively, whether by his grandmother’s gifts or the look on his mother’s face.

“And what about you?” He asked, knowing and fearing the answer. 

“I am going to Amon Ereb,” said Maedhros. “We will regroup with the survivors of Hithlum there and hold the fort to the best of our abilities.”

“I am going to Nargothrond,” said Curufin, which was never a good sign. Even now, he was rarely welcomed there. “To advise them that Maedhros will be continuing as sole monarch until such a time as Turgon makes himself known or Gil-galad comes of age. Between there and Amon Ereb, we hope to fortify the Andram mountains and the River Narog and move as many of our people south-east of them as we can.”

That would put Doriath between Morgoth’s forces and the Noldor, and them between him and Balar. 

“I am going to the Falls of Sirion,” said Maglor, which fit well with Curufin’s description of their plan. “I will hold the Andram line there, and we shall try to devise our own pathway following the river through it, so that the Sirion might carry us south to Balar, should the need arise.”

And all of them, together, turned to Dior’s parents.

His Nana looked at her hands for a long moment before speaking. She had such grace and power in her motions as a queen, though she had never been one and never would be. His Ada grasped one in his own hand. He had not her terrible power, but there was a subdued strength of will to him that never should have been underestimated. 

“Please,” Dior said, quietly, but there was nothing in this world to grant his simple prayer. 

“We’ll be staying here. To cover the retreat for as long as we are able. Many of these people left Doriath because of us. We owe it to them to ensure they will be able to find new homes in the Taur-Im-Duinath.”

Dior’s eyes were welling up, he knew, and he hated to seem week when they were trying to entrust him with something so important. “But you were supposed to have a happy ending. It isn’t fair.”

He hated himself immediately for saying it, with Maedhros and his brothers in the room. They were nearly the last remaining of their kin, and had suffered so much and so terribly. But Maedhros stepped around his son and came up to Dior, towering over him in a terrifying fashion.

He took Dior’s hands, one in each of his. 

“No,” agreed Maedhros, voice rasping with the legacy of tears all of his own. “It is the cruelest and most impossible thing in the world. And I’m sorry. What we are asking of you is uniquely terrible. I have no excuse, and I’m sorry.”

In all this, Dior had never worried for his own fate. Perhaps that was foolish. In some ways, he was of all of them the most likely to die. His parents had survived Morgoth before. No one had ever survived crossing the sea. Least of all with one of Fëanor’s kin at their side. As their husband. But the truth was that Dior had no such fear. It had to be done, and so he would do it. Live or die, he would do all he could. He had faith in that. But he knew that, live or die, he would never again see his parents in this world. They were destined to be sundered, but to be parted so soon seemed altogether more cruel than anything else.

“I’ll do it,” Dior said, aware of how quiet his voice had become. “But you have to promise me that you’ll try to live. Please. As long as you can? Run back to Doriath if you have to.”

Nana nodded, and Ada said, “of course, Dior.”

And so that night, he was wed, and the next morning, as the sun rose over Himring for one of the final times, he bid goodbye to his parents, and they each parted on the disparate paths that life guided them down. None of them wept then. There was little to be said that they had not all spent the last sleepless night weeping over. 

In his halls the Doomsman of the Valar did not weep either. To his wife, he said, “Do you think Father intended this cruelty? All this suffering?”

“Did you?” She asked, hands busy with embroidery. A single moment in all the fabric of Arda, depicted just by her hand. In it, Dior, as real as life, knelt to accept the Silmaril of Maedhros, what was known as the Blessing of Lúthien. She sat on the edge of the platform on which his throne rested, just to his left. 

To this, the Doomsman said nothing at all. Such was not his way. It was answer enough for her to know that he had not.

At the opposite side of the same platform, a bright spirit sat, his glowing figure illuminating half the room. Oh, there had been shock and amusement here just hours ago, when Fingon had seen him. 

“Will you let them pass?” He asked, voice contained in a way both his hosts knew was uncharacteristic. Normally, he was willing to state what he wanted them to do in a way that was both blunt and critical.

Vairë’s hands stilled. She looked to her husband. Of the two of them, his sight was by far broader. Each possibility lay before him like the many streams that comprised the flowing mouth of the river Sirion, where Elwing Dioriel would never now find her wings. He saw them all, in their living and their dying, and tried to judge them not too harshly for the choices he knew they had never made.

He knew the Dior who had held the Nauglamir, in his covetousness, and had led Doriath to ruin. He knew the Celebrimbor who had welcomed evil into his halls without a covetous thought in his mind and had brought ruin just the same. He saw the irony of Maglor, Lord of the River Sirion. He knew all of Eru’s children, in his way, and knows us, in ours. With the guidance at each of his hands, he hoped to make the best choices for all of them that were in his power.

“I suppose,” he said eventually, “we shall have to see how they choose to make the journey. In large part, the decision will be Ossë’s, and he is easily offended as you may recall.”

Ossë had allowed the Noldor to leave Aman once. There was little question whether he would object to letting one of the least offensive of them back in, a fact which all three of they watchers well knew.

“I think,” said Fëanor, “that you are quite right about that. Let us see what the journey tells us.”

It occurred to Námo that they had, perhaps, been a terribly great influence on each other, over the years. As of yet, he could not find it in him to mind.

**Author's Note:**

> New years’ eve bonus fic! I have another one of this series written out (about Nimloth), so look forward to that in coming weeks! Also check out the sequel to my Harry Potter fic ‘Scales’ and some of my Star Wars work if you haven’t already!!


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